Climbing in Nepal

By Ken | Published: December 10, 2008

A friend of mine is climbing some previously unclimbed peaks in Nepal.

He has a blog describing their adventure, but the sickest part IMO is this video.

Posted in /dev/random, /friends | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

“Do what you love”

By Ken | Published: December 8, 2008

*note: the shortcut to the end of this post is to read the essay “How to do what you love” by Paul Graham.

Well almost a year to the date since my last post. I figure I should probably get at least one post on the record for 2008 and if I stay motivated maybe a few more.

Over the past 4 months I have been focusing a lot more on investing. As a result of that I have been reading about well known investors their strategies, successes, and failures. I have found Warren Buffett in particular to be extremely interesting. Buffett in general keeps things simple, he looks for good values with proven earning ability, sticks to stuff that he understands and avoids high risk situations. In this interview with Charlie Rose he quips that he

“is lucky to get paid for doing something he would… pay to do”

.

Over the weekend I spent some time musing about the whole “Do what you love” dilemma. I feel quite fortunate that I discovered a love for technology at a young age and grew up in a time where this combined with some ambition has proven to be a pretty good hand to play. I can’t really imagine how I would be making a living and most importantly if I would be nearly as happy had I been dealt a different hand.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered “do I really love what I do”? I have never really hated any particular workplace, some I found more satisfaction in, some I like the co-workers better than others. Even when I was worked on a commercial fishing boat in Alaska doing hard labor 16 hours or more a day I was overall pretty content with my decision at that time.

But the point that stuck in mind is that I don’t wake up whistling dixie so excited to jump on the horse and think “I love what I am doing, I never want to do anything else”. At this point I found myself in what is probably not the typical “do what you love” dilemma that most people face. It seems like people have a tendency to try and figure out if they should do what they need to do to survive or if they should say “screw it” and “do what they love”. Take for example a musician or artist who may be working some soul sucking job instead of chasing their life’s passion. In my case I was trying to determine if I love what I do, or if I just feel that way because I haven’t done enough of what I hate. Or maybe there is something that I would *really* love to do, but having never felt that feeling I am assuming because I like what I do that I am doing what I love.

I should probably conclude with some self realization but I have yet to come to any conclusions about my current path :p However I did find some joy in reading an essay by Paul Graham titled How to do what you love.

Posted in /dev/random, /Life, /me, /potpourri | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

CUWiN Homer Mesh Project

By Ken | Published: December 13, 2007

The CUWiN folks spent some time recently adding new equipment to the Homer mesh network. My company Metrix has provided them with all the gear for this project to provide the Village of Homer with a low cost tubes.

Posted in /freenetworks, /geek, /metrix, /seattlewireless, /work | Leave a comment

Shmoocon Labs 2008

By Ken | Published: December 13, 2007

Recently I have been getting all the stuff for Shmoocon Labs off the ground. In case you don’t know Shmoocon Labs is an event held one day prior to Shmoocon. The basic idea is as follows. Get 30 or so geeks, a handful of vendors with cool gear and spend a day hammering out the production network for Shmoocon. This includes the network that supports registration, the hacker arcade, and of course conference attendees. In addition we attempt to eat our own dogfood and build a tight network that will hopefully hold up against all the potential tomfoolery that happens at hacker cons.

There are couple of things we try to achieve by doing this:

  • Give people an opportunity to get hands on experience with the latest security and networking products
  • Get the vendors to show us their chops when it comes to rapidly deploying their gear in a real world environment
  • Create an open environment in the NOC where people can come by and check out the network, ask questions, etc…
  • Do yet another thing to make Shmoocon a unique experience when it comes to security conferences
  • Of course have fun doing it

Last year was the first year we did this and it was a success. It seems like every one had a great time, we actually did get the network up and running in time. We implemented and/or played with various technologies including but not limited too:

  • IPS
  • NAC
  • Vulnerability Assesment/Auditing
  • Centrally managed wifi using a controller and light weight AP based wireless system
  • Network Monitoring including availiblity, utilization, etc…
  • Centralized logging

And probably more that I can’t recall at the moment.

So anyways its time to do it again. If you have any suggestions or ideas for things that might make it more interesting this year, please let me know. This is includes things like:

  • Vendors interested in participating
  • Interesting open source tools to use
  • Local network services to offer
  • Ideas for contests and or games

Of course if you are going to Shmoocon and interested in participating go to the Labs web page.

Posted in /geek, /shmoocon, /travel, cons | Leave a comment

EaKiu: Eye Candy for the Wi-Spy

By Ken | Published: August 7, 2007

While at WWDC John and Daniel turned me on to EaKiu. Its a cool piece of software for the Wi-Spy 2.4Ghz USB Spectrum Analyzer. It touts some pretty cool 3D graphs. Unfortunately its OS X only. For Windows you can use manufacturer provided software, and for Linux you can use Dragorn’s software. Which both sport cool and helpful graphs, just not the same 3D eye candy.

Posted in /dev/random, /freenetworks, /geek, /metrix, /seattlewireless | Leave a comment

Wifi in the wall: Karo WEJ-11G

By Ken | Published: August 3, 2007

At work we just carrying this cool new device, an access point that fits in a wall box. Looks like it would be great for outfitting apartment buildings and/or condos with wifi coverage. It supports all the usual AP/Bridging/WDS, POE, SSL web management etc… Even supports remote syslog and SNMP.

WEJ-11-g

Posted in /dev/random, /geek, /metrix, /seattlewireless | Leave a comment

Learn something new every day

By Ken | Published: August 1, 2007

Usually in a bash script when I want to parse a file line by line I do something like this:
exec < foo.txt
while read LINE;
do
SOMEVAR=$SOMEVAR,$LINE
done

This evening I was writing a bash wrapper for debootstrap to automate the building of chroot environments and for some reason I chose to stray away from my norm and did the following:
cat foo.txt | while read LINE;
do
SOMEVAR=$SOMEVAR,$LINE
done

After a few test runs I noticed $SOMEVAR did not have what I expected after exiting the while loop. After some debugging (bash -x) I discovered the variable was magically empty after the last read LINE of the while loop. I immediately went back to old ways of parsing and sure enough it worked as I expected. Hmm... Well after finding the explanation it makes perfect sense. I am just surprised I hadn't run into it before.
From the Bash FAQ

E4) If I pipe the output of a command into `read variable', why doesn't
the output show up in $variable when the read command finishes?

This has to do with the parent-child relationship between Unix
processes. It affects all commands run in pipelines, not just
simple calls to `read'. For example, piping a command's output
into a `while' loop that repeatedly calls `read' will result in
the same behavior.

Each element of a pipeline runs in a separate process, a child of
the shell running the pipeline. A subprocess cannot affect its
parent's environment. When the `read' command sets the variable
to the input, that variable is set only in the subshell, not the
parent shell. When the subshell exits, the value of the variable
is lost.

Posted in /geek, /StupidShellTricks | Leave a comment

Updated Pyramid LiveCD Installer

By Ken | Published: August 1, 2007

I mentioned in this email a little while back that I released a new Pyramid LiveCD Installer with the 1.0b5 version of Pyarmid. This CD provides a simple method for boot strapping a Soekris net45XX/net48XX single board computer.

Some models accept normal compact flash cards for the operating system media in which case you could easily install an OS image using another machine and compact flash card reader. However some of the models have soldered on flash and on these systems the PXE boot strap method is the only way to install on the board.

Setting up a “PXE boot” environment can be a little cumbersome if you have never done it before. With the LiveCD everything down to the IP address is configured out of the box so you should be ready to flash images onto boards in 5 minutes or so just by following the simple instructions.

Posted in /dev/random, /freenetworks, /geek, /metrix, /seattlewireless, pyramid | Leave a comment

Fire @ the Kincora…err Manray

By Ken | Published: July 31, 2007

Fire!  After hacking on a Koolu today at the office I noticed the smell of something burning. Concerned we had shorted some hardware we frantically sniffed around the office looking for fire. Turns out the back of the building that is home to Kincora and Manray was on fire.

Posted in /dev/random, /seattle | Leave a comment

New Digs

By Ken | Published: July 31, 2007

Alot of things have happened in 2007 with my company. We completely revamped our online store to start of the year, we have added a ton of new products and we moved in to a new address located on pine in Capitol Hill. June 16th marked an entire year since I left my full time job as infosec engineer in corporate America.

Posted in /dev/random, /me, /metrix, /seattle, /work, pyramid | Leave a comment